1. Field of the Invention
The teachings provided herein are generally directed to multifunctional and configurable wall plate designs for adding flexibility to placement of a single wall plate design.
2. Description of Related Art
In John Ortberg's book “When the Game Is Over It All Goes Back in the Box”, and in James Gleick's 1999 book “Faster”, we spend sixteen minutes a day (roughly one year of our lives) looking for lost possessions. Meanwhile, according to another study, the average American burns 55 minutes a day looking for things they know they own but cannot find. That adds up to a total of almost 14 days a year people spend just trying to find lost things. According to yet another study, we clock in 31 minutes a day hunting for lost things—remote controllers (5 minutes), keys (10 minutes), socks and shoes (7 minutes), lottery tickets (4 minutes) and passports (1 minute) and 17 minutes shouting “you had it last”.
People constantly struggle to find ways to prevent misplacing daily items, and a common way of solving the problem is to place them in the same location, and preferably a location that is obvious and frequented and in the normal path of daily activities. Solutions include hooks and hangers for keys, hats, dog leashes, and the like, however, many of these hooks and hangers require creating a hole in a wall material that has no other purpose, and such hole often strips-out and requires making a new hole and patching the old hole, if possible. To get around this problem, companies like 3M have created some useful adhesive devices that are vast improvements over what was available in the past, but even these improved adhesive devices fail regularly. Other solutions have included placing a table, or hanging a shelf or cabinet, near a doorway or location of high traffic. Such items may help alleviate the problem, but they can take-up valuable floor space, often create an obstacle to avoid, and need to be moved for routine cleaning and floor maintenance. In addition, things can fall behind tables, and shelves and cabinets also require making holes in the wall material, as well as occasional replacement of hardware and patching of the wall material when they fail or are moved. Some attempts have been made at extending existing wall panels, but these devices lack in configurability, making them difficult to use.
Accordingly, and for at least the above reasons, one of skill would appreciate a multifunctional and configurable wall plate system that helps address the problems set-forth above, and makes use of existing wall fixture hardware, saves valuable floor space, and allows for selecting a desired configuration from a plurality of configurations offered by a single design. Such a system would allow for the tooling manufacture of a single design having sufficient interchangeability with other components, covering a wide variety of configurations and applications and making it practical to market a single solution for an economical residential or commercial use.